iFixIt Tears Down mid-2013 11.6-inch MacBook Air

The epic week of disassembly continues: Today, the MacBook Air 11″ found its way onto our teardown table and was soon just another Apple in our bushel o’ teardowns.

Weve already taken apart this year’s MacBook Air 13″ and we know last year’s 11″ Air inside and out, so we didn’t expect many surprises when we popped the hood on this edition. But the new 11″ did have a few oddities tucked away in its aluminum sleeves.

For starters, the AirPort card received an upgrade from the 2012 model, with the addition of 802.11ac Wi-Fi as found in the AirPort Extreme. The new 11″ Air also features an SSD that resembles the one used in the 13″, save one key difference: the chips on the 11″ Air are from Marvell, Sandisk, and Samsung, rather than Samsung alone.

The 11″ MacBook Air did equal its broader sibling in terms of repairability, scoring a 4 out of 10 on our repairability scale.

Teardown highlights:

• The refreshed MacBook Air 11″ retains the same model number as the 2012 iteration: A1465. The slim, trendy profile of the 11″ model is identical to that of its 13″ sibling, down to the new dual-microphone array.

• While it doesn’t get the “all day performance” of the 13″ Air, the 7.6 V, 5100 mAh battery provides up to 9 hours of life in the 11″ MacBook Air. At 8.08 oz and 38.75 watt-hours, the new battery trumps last year’s puny 7.90 oz module rated at 35 watt-hours and providing a measly 5 hours of battery life.

• It appears that the 2013 MacBook Air 11″ uses the same PCIe-based SSD that we dug out of the 13″ model. However, this particular drive is a SanDisk module, fitted with components from three different manufacturers:
SanDisk 05131 016G 16 GB NAND flash (128 GB total)
Marvell 88SS9183 PCIe SSD controller
Samsung K4B2G1646E 512 MB DDR3 SDRAM